Page 27 of The Witches of Cambridge

THE FIRST WITCH OF CAMBRIDGE

1692

Dear Reader,

We arrived on May 14 in the rough-hewn city of Boston, which was barely a city when compared to London, for despite the vendors in the streets and the smell of fish that wafted over from the busy docks with stands selling all manner of sea creatures, there were still green fields, called the Common, where people set their sheep and cows to ramble free. My mistress did not wish to return to Massachusetts, which she considered to be a cold, barbaric place, but I wanted a world I had never known, and that was what I found. If you closed your eyes, you could imagine you were in the countryside even when you were in the heart of the city. Open them again, and you’d see the brick buildings where a dozen people might live in one room. It was city enough, for the roads were filled with sewage, and the ashes from the chimneys turned the alleyways black.

My mistress had forsaken who she was so that she might become the wife of a great man, in her case the reverend of the North Church in Boston, Increase Mather. My master had come to Harvard College at the age of twelve and graduated when he was seventeen. He became president of Harvard College, and the board has asked him to move across the river from Boston, but the Reverend says that Cambridge is no better than hell, a fetid marshland filled with wolves and crows where no decent person would live. I nearly laughed when he said so, for I have been to hell, and I can say without a doubt, Cambridge was nothing like it. I knew because I’d followed my master to the college, sent by my mistress to keep an eye on him. I already knew she was elusive about revealing her truest self and was discreet in all matters. I was aware that she kept a bat in her sewing room, letting him out at night. A Reverend’s wife should not have such a pet, one that came to her when it was called, and that was when I knew that even my kind mistress could keep secrets.

I took the ferry across the river, then tagged after the Reverend with the help of his enslaved man, Spaniard, who oversaw the horses. Spaniard and I were not allowed to talk to one another, but we did so now and then. We both wanted the same thing, our freedom, above all else.

When I arrived in Cambridge, I believed I’d found heaven. The marshes were dazzling in the shining yellow daylight, the river was filled with silver fish. On my first visit to Cambridge, I noticed there were crows everywhere, a sign that my mother had told me meant good luck. We were the women who were judged, the ones who were tossed into deep water, tied to chairs until we drowned. That was the reason I kept my talents to myself. I kept quiet, but I knew who I was. The truth is, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Harvard College then consisted of five buildings, including an abandoned school for native people, begun as a form of repayment for the land that had been stolen from them. It had been called New College, for Cambridge was known as Newtowne, with students who trained for the ministry, but when the minister John Harvard donated four hundred books and a portion of his estate, the school was renamed. Money mattered, even then, but power mattered more. I looked through the hazy window glass to watch Reverend Mather meet with his fellow ministers. They wished for a more conservative world than the one they already had, one in which their beliefs were to be the only vision for our lives. The students here trained to be Puritan ministers. There was no drinking or smoking, and they were often trained in medicine, compounds, and simples that were mixtures meant to rebalance their spirits after committing sins and keep evil away.

I considered the students to be fools; they would have done better with midwives and wise women as their teachers. My mother, who had practiced the Unnamed Art, taught me real medicine, the uses of the earth’s plants and herbs to fight illness. As for evil, the ministers could peer into a looking glass if they wished to see that. I wondered if they even saw the beauty that surrounded them, beyond the iron gates they had put up to keep themselves safe. The area surrounding Harvard was still wilderness, but when I sat beneath the old oak near the blacksmith’s shop and ate a fresh plum picked from a twisted tree, I knew for certain that I had found what I was looking for. Cambridge was where I first began to think it might be possible for me to be free.

While the Reverend was away in London pleading for a colony that would adhere to his Puritan beliefs, a witchcraft mania had started in Salem, Massachusetts, and we arrived in the midst of this madness. The jails were filled with citizens who had been accused of talking to the devil and causing their neighbors to have fits. Nearly all of those arrested in Salem were women, but the previous minister of that cursed town, George Burroughs, had also been brought to jail, for the people of Salem had accused Reverend Burroughs of turning into a black dog that ran through the fields at night, attacking women and biting children. In truth, a black dog is a blessing, it will protect you no matter what circumstances might arise, but the people of Salem feared anything they didn’t understand. Darkness of any sort frightened them, perhaps because they carried it inside their own hearts. Instead of speaking at the pulpit, George Burroughs sat in jail, and, as it turned out, there were as many rats in Salem as there had been in London, and just as many fools.

In June, soon after our arrival from London, a woman named Bridget Bishop had been hanged, accused of bewitching five young women. A record of her trial would be written up the following year in Cotton Mather’s book The Wonders of the Invisible World, and his father, Increase, would write and publish Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men, in which the Reverend insisted the court no longer accept testimony from alleged victims, for the victims might be controlled by the devil while in court giving testimony. A person could be tried for reasons that would be judged ridiculous by any rational person. Trivial incidents, such as owning a black dog or cursing a neighbor’s field, could be the cause of an arrest. It was said that Bridget Bishop used poppets of lace for her spellcasting, and for that she was hanged on Gallows Hill on June 10, nearly a month after we had arrived in this country.

I went to Salem even though it seemed a dangerous place for a woman like me. I knew a witch when I saw one, and I didn’t see a single one on the roads we took. All I saw were women who were old and poor, or those who were too young or too beautiful to be believed when they spoke out. A witch is never the woman you think she is. She’s the one you don’t notice, who sleeps in the reeds, who calls blackbirds to her, who knows how to disappear before your eyes. The truth is, she is very much like me.

Increase Mather wished to be among those who heard the evidence against the minister George Burroughs, so off we went. It was the middle of August, that overheated month when women were known to faint if they spent too much time in the sun. It was beautiful countryside going north from Boston, filled with marshes and fields, but there had been a terrible conflict called King Philip’s War, the deadliest war of that century, with over 2,500 English settlers killed. Thousands of Wampanoag and other tribes had also been murdered or enslaved during King Philip’s War, the bloodiest conflict there would ever be on these shores. The area was still said to be treacherous. The settlers believed the native people to be demons who must be chased far away from cities and towns, and they insisted the land belonged to the takers, the men of God who had arrived on tribal lands with bibles in their coats.

Now, from our carriage, I spied a young girl with long black hair running through the woods. She was like a beautiful shadow disappearing as I watched. She ran so fast among the birch trees, it was as if she were a deer. One day I would be the one running through the fields and the marshes. One day I would escape and make my fate my own. On the day that I did so, the world would be mine.

I could tell from the start that Cotton Mather wished to eclipse his father, as the sun eclipses the moon. It was a family where the men wished to rise above others, and even though I was young, I knew nothing good could ever come of that, whether the father was a street sweeper or the president of Harvard. The younger Mr. Mather said his goal in Salem was to fight evil, but on our journey he waited for no one to be looking, then placed a hand on my knee. I can’t say I was surprised. I could feel the heat of his intentions, even though he didn’t bother to look at me. I was nothing, why shouldn’t he assume I would be his for the taking? I dressed plainly, for beauty was often a curse. I had seen it cause destruction too many times, and I never let my guard down. Cotton Mather soon moved his hand beneath my skirt; we sat close and what he was doing couldn’t be seen by any of the others in the carriage. I felt a comment rise in my throat, but I knew enough not to speak it aloud, for I would surely be blamed for intoxicating him. The best I could do was to shift in my seat, moving closer to my mistress. “Do you believe in evil?” I asked her.

“How can you be human and not believe in evil?” Mistress May answered in a soft voice. She glanced at her son, the man she had brought into this world. He did not return her gaze, and I wondered if he saw women at all. I wondered if my mistress knew who he truly was, as I did. It was then that I took Cotton Mather’s hand and brought it to my mouth. I remember his look of delight until I bit him. He grabbed his hand away and glared at me, but he didn’t say a word. He didn’t even cry out loud. He knew I was a witch then.

We had rooms at an inn not far from the docks. People didn’t look at you in Salem or they looked at you too closely, and either greeting was frightening. I was reminded of the prison in London, where we didn’t dare to lift our eyes to the guards. That was another place where women knew enough to disappear, always gauging how best to behave. I was a fast learner when it came to such things. Don’t talk, merely listen, watch them when they’re not looking at you.

Salem had been named after the word Shalom, peace. I stayed in a room near the kitchen, but I spent most of my time upstairs with Mistress May. She had the shaking disease and she was taking medicine that made her drowsy, and sometimes it made her see things that weren’t there. She wore her onyx necklace even when she was ill and in bed. It had been a gift from her husband, and she had told me she never removed it, no matter the circumstances. The physicians had no idea how to cure her, and I had bishopwort to strengthen her, and bittersweet, which cured dizziness and vertigo. I knew that the old cures were the best, even if men didn’t believe in them. When I sat with Miss May, she told me things about her family that she had likely never told anyone else, how she had left behind all that she was for the love of the Reverend.

“I was someone else,” she told me. “You couldn’t understand.”

But I understood all too well. I took a flower from a bouquet on her bedside table, and it wilted in my hands. The bud turned from white to red when I breathed on it. My mistress laughed out loud. I swear I had never seen her so delighted.

“No wonder I took you from that prison,” she said. For the first time she truly understood who and what I was. We were the same, but my mistress had closed the door to magic, she’d taken a vow to renounce her true nature. Our secret was in our blood, which turned black when we were cut, but she had done her best to be an ordinary woman to please the Reverend.

When the maid came in to make up the bed, she overheard May Mather tell me that when she was a girl a bat had followed her, and it sometimes still appeared. It was tapping at the windowpane as we spoke. The maid looked at us the way people did in Salem, from the corner of her eye. Trouble to come, I told myself.

I knew I must be ready for whatever happened next.

At the minister’s trial there were hundreds of onlookers who shouted and demanded his punishment. All at once, gathering clouds crossed over the sun and darkness fell; the onlookers became silent. The darkness was proof of something, but they weren’t sure what. These people believed that the devil walked beside them, that he placed his hand on their shoulders and left his mark and called women to him at midnight. Not even ministers were safe from his terrible demands to commit acts of sin and depravity. The devil lost his power when faced with judges, or at least that was what Cotton Mather said when he came to my door at night. I heard him breathing. I heard his desire. I had moved a bureau in front of the door and placed five black stones upon it to repel evil.

“I will keep the devil from you,” he promised me, but he was a liar. Evil wasn’t a mystery to me; it was there on the other side of the door. I knew his plan. He’d have me, then have no remorse when he accused me of witchery.

“Go to hell,” I said. “Go before I send you there.”

After that he came to despise me. “Can you not find a better servant?” I heard him say to his mother. When she didn’t answer, I knew what she was thinking. Can I not find a better son?

At the trial a deep quiet cloaked the madness in the room. It was as if we were poised on the edge of the earth and could easily fall into a pit of darkness. There was a fire burning somewhere beneath us, and smoke was in the air. I felt I might be asphyxiated, not by smoke, but by pure evil. There was no devil, I knew that for a fact, only the hatred of men, which was real enough.

“He’s come to this,” I heard Increase Mather say of the minister. “It won’t go well for him.”

George Burroughs, a tall, serious man, appeared to have no fear as he climbed up the ladder to his fate. It was the ladder of doom, and I had seen it before. It led upward, as if to heaven, when its true destination was hell. If I had done something to save him, it would have been the end of me, but I will always regret not trying to save him. I stood motionless beneath the vast lake-blue sky when I wished I could run to him and cut the rope with a knife. I would have liked to burn the fields down all around us.